I had a great time at the Bridg­ing Worlds Con­fer­ence and spent some amaz­ing vaca­tion days in Cam­bo­dia and Malaysia, so I’m late fol­low­ing up on my con­fer­ence promise to post a link to the slides for my talk Librar­ian 2.0: New Breed or Just Another Day at the Office? (12.2MB PDF). Please note that these slides are more cur­rent than the ones on the con­fer­ence site. I’ll find out about post­ing the accom­pa­ny­ing paper, too.

The con­fer­ence itself was won­der­ful (the orga­niz­ers did a good job), and I was espe­cially pleased to meet in person:

• Haz­man Aziz — I wish I had half of Hazman’s energy
• Ivan Chew — I loved Ivan’s presentation
• Peter God­win — Peter is a very funny fellow
• Kathryn Green­hill — finally!
• Joann Ran­som — who is doing some amaz­ing online com­mu­nity work in New Zealand

I also highly rec­om­mend play­ing any of Brian Kelly’s con­fer­ence speaker games if you ever get the chance.

For those of you who asked for links, the two major papers I dis­cussed in my talk are Fiat Lux, Fiat Late­bra: A Cel­e­bra­tion of His­tor­i­cal Library Func­tions (which details “The Seven Ages of Librar­i­an­ship”) by D. W. Krum­mel and Par­tic­i­pa­tory Net­works: The Library as Con­ver­sa­tion by David Lankes. Both of these gen­tle­men did all of the heavy lift­ing for illus­trat­ing how we’re mov­ing into an eighth age of librar­i­an­ship (“par­tic­i­pa­tory librar­i­an­ship”), and Scott Nichol­son con­nected the dots for me while dis­cussing the his­tor­i­cal con­text of gam­ing in libraries.

As for pic­tures, it’s going to take me a cou­ple of weeks to cull and label the 5GB of shots I took (espe­cially since GLLS2008 starts this week­end!), but they’ll even­tu­ally appear on my my Flickr account. Thank you to every­one who helped make this one of the most amaz­ing trips of my life.

Tags: brian kelly, bw2008, d w krummel, hazman aziz, ivan chew, joann ransom, kathryn greenhill, peter godwin, seven ages of librarianship

Col­bert Report — Com­mu­nist Library Threat

Tags: colbert report, libraries, stephen colbert

Using Video Games as Bait to Hook Readers

“Mr. Bagley, now a senior, was so addicted that he some­times aban­doned friends in the din­ing hall to return to the game. But the story was never the attrac­tion. Both the nar­ra­tive and the char­ac­ters, he said, were too sim­plis­tic, and he gave up “World of War­craft” in his sopho­more year.

Video games, said Mr. Bagley, 21, ‘cer­tainly don’t have the same degree of emo­tional and intel­lec­tual com­plex­ity of a book.’

Some peo­ple argue that video games are an emerg­ing medium likely to undergo an evo­lu­tion. ‘I wouldn’t be sur­prised if, in 10 or 20 years, video games are cre­at­ing fic­tional uni­verses which are every bit as com­plex as the world of fic­tion of Dick­ens or Dos­to­evsky,’ said Jay Parini, a writer who teaches Eng­lish at Mid­dle­bury Col­lege.” [New York Times]

I’m dis­ap­pointed in this arti­cle, not because it isn’t a “rah rah, video games are great” piece, but because I don’t think it reflects what would have come from eight months of research, which is how long the author spent on it. Sev­eral librar­i­ans, includ­ing me, have talked with the reporter since Jan­u­ary, and I think we all expected some­thing a lit­tle deeper, regard­less of the view­points expressed. The excerpt above is indica­tive of the back-and-forth, “one said good, the other said bad” piece. I don’t think this arti­cle adds any­thing new to the debate, and I expected a series titled “The Future of Read­ing” from the New York Times to offer some­thing more in-depth.

In the end, I think this arti­cle is a rorschach test for how the reader feels about video games. If you’re against them, you prob­a­bly feel like this arti­cle val­i­dates your objec­tions. If you think video games are okay (or even ben­e­fi­cial), you can also find quotes to sup­port that per­spec­tive. Cer­tainly the com­ments get inter­est­ing and con­tinue the “good ver­sus bad” debate, but I keep won­der­ing when we’re going to get past extremes in this dis­cus­sion in order to fig­ure out how to inte­grate a for­mat that is clearly here to stay into our kids’ media diet (and into our libraries) in a bal­anced way.

Tags: gaming in libraries, literacy, media literacy, new york times, videogames